January 1, 2004
Best wishes as we start a new leap year. As with any election year, may 2004 bring you the fabled courage to change the things you can, the serenity to accept the things you can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Lacking the courage (or is it the wisdom?) to change my adopted method of sending New Year greetings, I offer for your amusement the annual self-indulgent list of memorable cultural products I encountered in 2003. For good or ill, some of these clogged my brain for weeks. Tell me what I should clog it with instead.Aaron Caplan
Spelling bees made noble. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
In this documentary, The Crucible moves down the coast for a modern version of the witch trial. Notice how the police and prosecutors never smile, and how being involved in clown activities -- or even worse, quoting Monty Python routines at the wrong time -- will always be held against you.
The true story of Chuck Barris, game-show creator and hit man for the CIA. (Well, if Harvey Pekar's American Splendor was a true story, why isn't this?)
Actually, this won't be a favorite until the extended version comes out on DVD, but it is worth a trip to the big screen to see the King of the Nazgul swinging his morning star and receiving his deflating reward.
A parable of contagion from the land of Mad Cow Disease. (No, I mean that other land of Mad Cow Disease.) The zombies from Night of the Living Dead (1968) were created when we brought back radiation from outer space, just like the extraterrestrial contagion from The Andromeda Strain (1971). The 28 Days zombies remind us that you don't even need to leave planet earth to find out that it's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
Finally, a movie with good leading roles for older actresses! A boy and his dog and his grandmother train for the Tour de France, but unexpectedly find themselves in a scary new world across the Atlantic Ocean, where the natives prefer hamburgers to frog legs.
For a different Franco-American comparison, watch William Friedkin's 1977 remake next to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 original. In both, the protagonists are so down and out in a grimy little Brazilian town that driving a truckload of nitroglycerine through the jungle seems like an improvement--they'll either get paid well or die, and either is a step up. Despite the similarities, the tang of Puritanism allows you to spot the Yankee product. In the French version, the protagonists are down and out because, well, that just happens to some people. In the American version, their poverty is punishment for their sins. In the French version, some live and some die, with no necessary relationship to their virtue. In the American version, the sinners live longer the more virtuous they are, but none can escape final retribution. In the French version, a truck explodes and you never find out why. In the American version, the truck explodes because it gets a flat tire that makes it skid over a cliff. Ah, America: where we think everything happens for a reason.
Of course, if you really want to learn something about America, head straight for Don Knotts in The Love God?, a towering cinematic achievement from the man who brought you Deputy Barney Fife and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. The mighty thespian plays an honorable man falsely accused of publishing a pornographic magazine. The opening statement of his attorney from the Council for Constitutional Liberty, the famous Darrell Evans Hughes (played by James Gregory), is one that any aspiring civil rights lawyer would wisely commit to memory.
Ladies and gentlemen, I've sat here and heard my client Abner Peacock called a filthy obscene degenerate, a sex-ridden defiler of virtue, a man whose lust knows no bounds, whose publications have plumbed the depths of sexual degredation, and are a reflection of his own sex-obsessed mind.Once acquitted, Knotts insists that he wishes to publish only a clean, wholesome, bird-watcher magazine. The Attorney General pleads with him: "With the whole world watching, a jury reaffirmed your constitutional right to continue publishing filth. Abner Peacock, if you love your country, you'll publish a filthy magazine!" They just don't make Attorneys General like they used to.We're not going to argue about that. [Google-eyed double-take from Knotts.] We can see that Abner Peacock is everything the Attorney General has told you he is. [Knotts slinks in chair.]
This is a dirty case. And a dirty little man. It is with disgust to the point of nausea that I find myself sitting next to this filthy little degenerate. But when I see this filthy little degenerate's constitutional rights being threatened, then I must take this filthy little degenerate into my arms, clasp him to my breast, and fight for this filthy little degenerate's constitutional rights and liberty with my very life!
[Rapturous applause, accompanied by more Oscar-worthy eye-googling by Knotts.]
There was a lot to like about The Guru (2002), Rivers and Tides (2001), High Noon (1952), Talk to Her (2002), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Pirates of the Carribean (2003), and Holes (2003).
Then, of course, there was my favorite moment of reality television (on Fox, naturally): 101 Things Removed From the Human Body (aired July 31, 2003--another day that will live in infamy). As reported in the Hollywood Weekly:"Some producers who do these kind of things are sort of shy about them, but not Eric [Schotz]," says Fox alternative and specials chief Mike Darnell. "Even I had trouble looking at some of this stuff. But Eric always brings enough passion as a producer that when he got excited about a 300-pound tumor, I got excited about a 300-pound tumor."No doubt Eric persuaded him by exclaiming, "Mike Darnell, if you love your country, you'll air my filthy television special!"
The pimpled teenagers working at the record stores in the shopping malls of Nelspruit, South Africa are under strict orders not to give you a moment's peace. Although they pretend to be helpful, they must be there to make sure you don't shoplift, because they certainly don't know anything about the inventory. When I asked where I could find the mbaqanga recordings, I got a blank and confused look in return. The clerk decided the safest thing to do was lead me over to the "Ethnic" section, which is where they file everything sung in an African language that isn't kwaito. (Their big seller that week was a Cher greatest hits package.)
Since the only discs available at the listening booth were the aforementioned Cher and a chart-topping collection of rugby anthems (Go Springboks!), I had to make my ethnic picks based on the cover art. Lucky for me, Mafikizolo had a great art director for their album Sibongile. That way, Marabi and Ndihamba Nawe were able to take up residence in my skull for the remainder of the trip and beyond. The group won the Album of the Year, Best Group, and Best African Pop categories in the Metro FM Music Awards a few weeks later.
Waar Was Jy? Vol. 3 promised to be a retrospective hits package of some sort, but it was hard to tell from the cover when the originals were recorded. The ever-helpful clerk said that it was a popular record for those nostalgic to hear songs "from olden times." Unfortunately, he was unable to tell me whether "olden times" were closer to 1950 or 1990. Turns out it was 1980 (plus or minus). This turned out to be just fine, since it corresponded to a vibrant selection of township pop, the best of which was the awe-inspiring Yvonne Chaka Chaka's Umqombothi. Although you've gotta wonder why she made the DJ from I'm In Love With a DJ (available on Waar Was Jy? Vol. 2) be from Wichita, Kansas. A sister city, perhaps?
It's been said that record producer Joe Meek (a biopic waiting to happen--Chuck Barris and Harvey Pekar have got nothing on him) couldn't sing to save his life, but it took the compilation Songs in the Key of Z to prove it. Compare the cosmos-altering hit to the blowsy demo recording. Truly a man who overcame his handicaps.
The highlight of the Compendium of Corporate Cringe (currently unavailable but described here), this excrescence from the human resources department clogged up my synapses for weeks. If it salvages my reputation any, please remember that my spirit of subordination to the original did not fully develop until I heard MC Vitamin D's Hard Rock Mix and the powerfully explanatory Teutonic Megamix.
Sixty-four short meditations on food. Not how it tastes, but how it both shapes and reflects lives. How does a middle-class couple deal with a mystery can in the pantry with no label? How can a fastidious restaurant manager keep the waiters from stealing without arousing their suspicions? How can two boys catch a pheasant with cigarettes and thread? What happens if your dinner guests start disrobing over the cheese fondue? After you've hiked all morning to the restaurant that serves game meat, does it really matter what is in Curry No. 3? HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
So maybe they'll make the Kim Fowley biopic before they get to Joe Meek. You can live a long and fruitful life without knowing that there was a missing link between "Alley Oop," Candice Bergen, Frank Zappa, Andrew Loog Oldham, Helen Reddy, Cat Stevens, Three Dog Night, and Joan Jett, but doesn't the universe make more sense knowing that there was? And that it was Kim Fowley?
The disc is great, but the liner notes are worth the price of admission by themselves. A portrait of a man who realizes (even if he usually prefers not to admit) the limits imposed by his middling talents and churlish personality triumphs over them by working harder and meaner than the competition. Imagine Richard Nixon on the Sunset Strip. Like fireweed, he grows best when the stronger, healthier forest around him has not yet recovered from a scorching.
So I'm walking to school one day. It's 3 February 1959. The day the music died. There's this girl crying, watering her lawn, an ugly teenage girl. I said, "excuse me, what's up?" And she says, "They've died!" "Who are THEY?" "Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens." Well, to teenage America at that exact moment in time, it was like Princess Di, or the assassination of President Kennedy [later]. It was kind of like, "Those teenage heroes are dead? Wow!" So when I heard it, I got excited. I said, "Then I will take over. I have a chance. The torch has been passed!" I threw my books into the garbage can, and the girl says, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm in rock 'n' roll now!"He couldn't help but go far with a mentor like Nick Venet.Venet's family were restauranteurs with a sideline in jukeboxes, and this gave him an early grounding in pop music. In 1958, he hitchhiked to Hollywood and hustled his way into the fringes of the record business--or what passed for it in 1950s California--because, as he put it, "I wanted to do something devastating; I wanted to behave as I liked without going to jail; I wanted to do something dishonest, but legal." Five years and 15 hits later, he was living in the same apartment block as Ann-Margret and Pierre Salinger.After a stint at American International Pictures writing soundtracks for fodder like The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, Fowley made a name for himself as a producer, composer, and A&R man, specialities that relied on his ever-sharpening skills of going to the right parties and goading nearby musicians into doing his will in the studio. But his string of one-hit wonders couldn't monopolize the burned soil around that plane wreck in Storm Lake forever. After a certain British import arrived in 1964, it was clear that "these guys are going to replace everyone in the industry and only a handful of Americans will be able to pull through."I remember walking off that day with the Number One in the United States, "Popsicles and Icicles," soon to be the Number Nothing because the Beatles were going on with "I Want to Hold Your Hand." It was then I decided that I would become a piece of shit full time.Know thyself, Kim. Embracing his new vocation, he made new enemies (and new creditors) on both sides of the Atlantic, while still managing to go to all the right parties. Not to mention tea with Joe Meek.I went to England out of curiosity, to find out what the Beatles meant. I was like those people who went to the Spanish Civil War in the Hemingway era, sitting on the hillside with their picnic baskets, watching battles.Returning periodically to California, he helped broker recording contracts for Jimi Hendrix and the Mamas and Papas (a steal at $250 per month, especially since "the girl can type and the boys can do office work"). He also released a few singles under his own name. "For all of you who think I suck," says Fowley, "blame [Bob Dylan], because he told me I could sing as good as he could. ... For all the awful Kim Fowley records which have come out over the years, it's all his fault."It's hard to believe it, but it's true.
The Kapalua, from your friends at Hawaiian Sun Chairs.